The Cultures of American Film

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About This Book

The Cultures of American Film integrates a number of approaches to the study of movies. Its chronological organization provides a historical overview, a survey of films across the decades from cinema's invention to the present. Its analytical approach addresses form and content: how films work and how we respond to them. By putting films in their cultural contexts, it examines how films fit into our lives and their own: that is, the life of film itself; the technologies that made them possible; the studios in which they were made; the filmmakers' struggles with politics and censorship. The Cultures of American Film covers movements, directions and directors, genres, the structures of films and their audiences.American film and its audience engage in a process of ongoing negotiation: will a film gain an audience? What kind of audience? A broad one, consisting of ages 18-46, the…